Word: madrid
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...strong possibility of having a lady commissar as your sleepermate. Angola's Benguela line, whose locomotives are the world's most fragrant (they burn eucalyptus logs), huffs up and down mountainsides, as does Chile's Antofagasta & Bolivia. The great Sud Express from Paris to Madrid - with a stop at the Spanish border for a change from standard-to broad-gauge (more than half a foot wider) undercar riage - still hauls magnificent Pullmans with inlaid-wood furniture and three-star menus. There are other royal rides for those who like to look an English cowslip...
This show has brought together prints from Boston, Madrid, Paris, Berlin and London to form the most comprehensive Goya show ever seen in America. It is impressive just to see the Disparates and the Desastres de la Guerra in Goya's working proofs, for these two series were published after his death, and the formal prints have been altered from what Goya meant them to be. But to have these juxtaposed with the Caprichos, and to see how Goya changed his images of human folly over 19 years is an unforgettable experience...
...Leonardo proposed to carry out this unprecedented and technically almost unimaginable project has long been a mystery. But his Madrid notes set down the method in full detail. He invented a revolutionary system of doing it in one piece, designing special furnaces and bracing systems and winches for it, and even a way of casting it buried upside down in the marshy Milanese soil without cracking the mold. It becomes clear that Leonardo, despite Michelangelo's bitching about his ineptitude as a sculptor, knew exactly how to make the horse and was prevented from executing his plan only because...
Precise Images. Most of Codex Madrid I is filled with exquisitely fine engineering drawings: designs for self-releasing hoist grapnels, frictionless bearings, clock escapements, wire-making machines, worm drives and so on. For Leonardo, the drawn image was more precise than the written. One of the striking things about the machines in the Madrid notebooks is how they prefigure the future history of formal engineering draftsmanship without becoming schematic diagrams. They are conceptions rather than blueprints, but conceptions that one could take to a factory and have built tomorrow. More over, they are conceived as a series...
...designs had been made public instead of resting in his notebooks, they would certainly have transformed the extremely crude face of Renaissance mechanics, bringing it to the pitch of sophistication the Chinese had reached four centuries earlier. That did not happen, and so by now the value of the Madrid codices is entirely historical: a large and beautiful patch of tesserae added to that gapped, puzzling mosaic of Leonardo's thought. One can only thank McGraw-Hill for presenting it with such dogged and fastidious care...